Throwing a power wheelchair

We'll never know what happened or why.  We didn't even take any good "after" pictures, let alone any "before" pictures.  After all, we didn't know it was going to happen.  Nor did we ask for any of the parts that were replaced during the repair.

We had gotten quite complacent about carrying my scooter and power chair around on the back of the Highlander.  We were being very careful about putting the ramp down too fast or too far because that supposedly caused the last bent Swing-Away.  And I thought we were being pretty careful about always putting the safety pin into the SwingAway whenever the SUV was moving, let alone carrying equipment.

Carolyn had loaded the power chair on the carrier leaving me to park my walker and inch into the passenger seat.  The only thing on my mind as we rounded the corner of Max and North heading toward Garfield was that we were going a little faster than I like when we hit the speed bump there.  I braced for the jostle which didn't surprise me.  But I wasn't prepared for the afterswing.   It felt like we had lost the shock absorbers on the rear of the Highlander.

Carolyn slowed the car without slamming on the brakes.  I looked out my window into the rear view mirror, surprised at seeing my power chair swinging out past the corner of the car.  That was not a good sign.  We drove past another house or two  until we could find a safe place to park and attempt to fix whatever the problem was.

The Swing-Away is held in place by a spring-loaded retention pin and a safety pin that is held in by a ball bearing we had lost some time ago.  Both pins were lying useless somewhere on the side of the road.  Fortunately, the power chair was still strapped tightly to the carrier.  It had hit nothing nor been hit by anything.  As we swung it back into place it was instantly obvious what the damage had been.  The top bar of the Swing-Away was twisted, probably less than 15 or 20 degrees, but enough that it wouldn't seat back so the pins could be inserted.  We couldn't close the Swing-Away or keep it close to closed.

Fortunately, we were less than a 5 minute walk from our house.  We dismounted the chair from the carrier and verified that it indeed had not been hurt.  Carolyn walked home to get a couple of bungee cords to hold the SwingAway in the closed position.  I wheeled home.  Our plans were somewhat altered for the evening.

It cost $500 for that little repair job.  And we'll never know.   Did the safety pin fall out.?  How could the carrier shear off the spring loaded pin?  Was it primarily the force of the speed bump?  I guess we'll never know.

I caught a fallling star & put it in my pocket!

It wasn't exactly on my bucket list but singing a solo with the Renaissance "Singing for Fun" class was definitely something that should have been on the list.

Turns out there is more to the solo business than just singing alone, at least the way it went down with me.  For one thing, I was asked to do a solo but not given an assigned song.  With over 10,000 songs in my music library, selecting a song is no easy matter.  To help me narrow the field, I looked for casual, nostalgic numbers and I also tried to find songs that needed a choral backup.  That way, the group wouldn't resent "my song".  Then I discovered that I was also responsible for arranging the number.  Fortunately, there was a recording of several Perry Como songs that I liked including my final choice of "Catch A Falling Star and Put It In Your Pocket".

I practiced at home alone, memorizing the words so I could concentrate on the arrangement.  I practiced different tempos and timbres.  Then I realized that it was my song and I could change the arrangement if I wanted to.  And there were a few minor changes.  It wasn't  until the week of the performance, though,before I finally "let go" and really sang what I wanted to.  On my last solo performance I finally understood I could improvise and the last note was completely different from what our group expected.  Yahoo!

Steven's capstone presentation

I think we've done a pretty good job of recognizing the educational successes of our children by getting to their graduation ceremonies. Needless to say, education is highly valued in our family.  One sign of that is the fact that all of our children and their spouses have a college degree.  In addition, four of them have a masters degree and one has a PhD.  Carolyn and I also have masters degrees.  But while we've attended graduation ceremonies, we haven't often been able to see the real work involved in obtaining those degrees.  We've seldom even seen grade records or transcripts.

So it was with distinct pride that Carolyn and I drove to Santa Cruz recently to take part in our son Steven's Capstone Presentation which is a significant part of his Masters Degree requirements.  For Steven the Capstone Project is roughly equivalent to a Masters Thesis or Literature Survey others in our family have had to do.  And, as with a thesis, part of the effort is to make a final oral presentation to faculty, advisers, and peers.  And in this case - family.

Steven put hours and hours into his research and even more time into a professional presentation that demonstrated his command of the subject.  A subject which was related to but not quite the same as what he has spent so much of his life working with in the past 5 or 6 years - chemicals and sponges.  Specifically, he traced the route of a naturally occurring biochemical with cancer controlling properties to a related, marketable synthetic economically viable drug.  He even gave the presentation a clever subtitle of "From Sea to Pharma-Sea".

I know just enough chemistry (it was my undergrad minor) to appreciate Steven's presentation without being a threat.  I understood his description of the analysis of the original chemical and the synthesis of various parts to determine which parts of the chemical had the most promise of being cost effectively synthesized.

Steven had designed a PowerPoint presentation which focuses on the main historical path while allowing for detours when one of his peers would ask a pertinent question.  He also had authoritative answers when the questions were less pertinent.

I could tell there was little fluff and a lot of solid research in this presentation but it was also fun to see his advisers and peers recognize the same.  There is no question that Steven has earned his masters degree.

For another, completely unbiased review of Steven's presentation by his wife Lisa, click HERE.

Possible origin of the name DropCam

You're liable to see a lot of advertisements for DropCam this year.  They won somebody's "Gadget of the Year" award which, of course, gives them bragging rights until they come out with something new or someone else's gadget beats this one.

I want to get into all the good features of this marvelous gadget but feel that the flaws are so important that I need to put them first.  Otherwise you could get so excited you stop in mid-review and miss the warning.

WARNING:  DropCam is an amateur security system - designed by, designed for, sold by, bought by, and mostly appreciated by amateurs.  Simply put, it suffers from the "dancing bear" syndrome.  You don't criticize how well a bear dances because you're so amazed he can dance at all.

Likewise DropCam is extremely easy to set up.  It is relatively inexpensive.  And it pretends to play with the big boys.   But it has a lot of growing up to do.  I've had the system in place for over a month and it should have settled down.  But I still get 1 to 3 false positives per hour and a complete signal drop with one or  the other of my two cameras.  A camera that cries "wolf" that frequently is soon a camera ignored and a camera ignored is no better than a camera never purchased.  It's a sad situation since it would be a great leap forward if it met expectations.  And it's sad because it looks like all the will and wherewithal was there.  For example, the camera triggers an alert if the sound or movement in the field of vision exceeds some threshold.  There's a sensitivity switch for the sound but nothing for the motion detection.  A waving flag, a moving shadow, almost anything at all triggers the motion alarm.  I keep hoping that there's some intelligent logic that will kick in and improve the alarm but it hasn't happened so far.'

Cutting out entirely seems to have something to do with the Wireless connection.  If you're close to the fringe of your wireless router's coverage, rather than drop into a lower definition transmit mode, the camera will just shut itself off.  Not an encouraging trick if you're depending on the camera to watch over valuable property or loved ones.  But it just may be the reason this is called DropCam.  It drops the signal better than any of its competitors.

The tracking software is straightforward but not powerful or easy to use.  And some of the best features, such as a timeline, are in the PC version but not the iPhone app.

I understand the audio feature (you can listen to and talk back to the surveiled object) is new on the latest cameras.  Don't count on it replacing a halfway decent baby monitor because it won't.  And they don't mention in their ads that the audio is half-duplex making you feel like a trucker with a push-to-talk CB.

Let me end on a positive note.  The camera  is quick and easy to install.  I had it running within 5 minutes and monitoring our front hallway within 10 minutes.  That's because I walk slowly.  Otherwise, those times would be half that.

So if you're an amateur looking for an amateur system this is a good one.  But professionals should keep looking.

Getting on the reunion committee

I never really considered asking to be on the planning or organizing committee.  I wanted to simply offer whatever expertise I had to make things run better and maybe reach out better to those class members who aren't natural joiners.  So it was with a little surprise and consternation that I greeted Bob's suggestion that I join the committee.  But it really didn't matter in the end since we held no meetings or conference calls and spoke only with Bob and Becky.  It was a delightful experience not caring whether my input was received happily or used completely.  I made suggestions as to what we wanted to put in the Memory Book and in what format we wanted to distribute it. I discussed limitations of the web site and  how it could be used.  I helped Becky set up a system of archiving her work on the Memory Board that also made it possible for me to duplicate some of that work on the website if we got permission.  My name is all over the website more than I care to see, so I don't care if it is nowhere in the Memory Book except my own biography page.

When Becky sent out her "one and only memo" telling people how to submit their biography page and what to include, I realized that over-communicating wasn't going to be a problem here.  I decided to fill in the gap - although admittedly only with people who had working, verified email addresses.  I think Becky did make a few phone calls and I probably made a dozen but that was nothing compared to the volume of email.  That's the disorienting part of email - for much less work, I made a disproportionately large impact.

So what's next?

HS Reunion communication in the email world

Five years ago I received a brief note about our High School Class 45th Reunion.  I responded immediately by email and waited for things to happen.  They never did.  If I ever got a reply, I didn't see it.  And the reunion festivities came and went without my giving it any further notice.  This year I was determined that that not happen again.

Of course there have been a couple of changes and events during the past 5 years to make some change inevitable.  Five years ago I had just barely retired and I was in the process of developing a schedule I felt I could live with.  Five years ago I made the assumption that the reunion committee's number one priority was to contact every member of the graduating class and try to persuade them to come.  Now I know that the contact effort is spotty at best and people may get dropped from further contact efforts if a mistyped email bounces back undelivered.

This time around I not only had more organized, free, time but I also had found a piece of inexpensive web-based reunion software that looked like it could really help us get organized.  Even though I had only received one phone call from the head of the reunion committee on December 1, 2011, I was already thinking of it as "us" and "our committee".  This time I wasn't going to let the reunion happen without me.

The first thing I did was to call the person back who had called me and said I was very interested.  I volunteered my help which I knew was going to be limited since I live 800 miles from the high school.  And I asked all sorts of questions about who was on the committee, what time lines were in place, what things were already underway.  I also wrote to the technology/science teacher at the high school who also appeared to be the school's webmaster.  Ideally, alumni functions such as reunions would be coordinated and supported out of that office.  I have yet to see a high school level alumni office capable of that level of support.

But the teacher/IT director was kind enough to announce the main reunion event, the guy in charge of this year's event, and the address of the website which has become our offficial web site.  For the next 2 to 3 weeks I learned the ins and outs of the website software called Classreport and started populating it with members of our graduating class, and telling Bob how it could make his life easier by organizing our emailcommunication with class members.  It was at this point we made a below sonscience decision to put a higher priority on communicating with people who have email.  That made all the difference in the world to emaillers.

We continued to call phone numbers when we didn't have someone's email address and we even followed up with snail mail notes and announcements. But where we had the email address, communication was 10 times more frequent.  Official Invitations to the reunion went out by email, phone, and regular mail on January 28, 2012 and if you didn't have email that may have been the last time you heard from the reunion committee.

A friend's death

Once again my world has been shaken and will never be the same again.  John Popadak called to tell us that his wife Sigrid (Ziggy) had passed away, her body so riddled with cancer cells that no treatment was possible other than that which might have made her last few days bearable.

We have known John and Ziggy since 1985 as John held a job at Inland Regional Center similar to mine at Harbor Regional Center.  Like us, even close to the same age, John and Ziggy had left house and family in Southern California to pursue a career in Sacramento.  We could and did empathize with each other.

Someone was telling me the other day that we're lucky if we get what we deserve in life.  If so, I don't think Ziggy was very lucky but she would probably disagree.  She did have a wonderful husband and family members who thought the world of her.  She made friends easily and shared her talents.  She brightened up the Knit-Wits, the knitting club at the local library and was so patient trying to teach Carolyn and me a card game that I never did understand.

So if Ziggy had gotten what she deserved she would have had all she did have without all the health problems and disappointments she suffered.  Of course she now no longer has the pain and suffering while she does still have friends and family so maybe she finally has what she deserves.  We will miss her.